@theorytoe@mischievoustomato@tadano your right man. I heard some people are quitting fedi for lent, maybe I should do that and an autistic qt will appear
The year is 2001. You just got off work at McDonald's. On your way out, you buy a swiss and onion burger off the dollar menu and fill up your gas tank for $25. Nobody to hang out with on a weekday, so you head home and log into windows XP. You check AIM for online friends: nobody yet, so you boot up some runescape and kick back for a few hours before bed. Life is good.
The year is 2010. You just got off work. You pick up a large 3 topping Papa John's pizza for $10 and fill up the tank for $38. Once home, you log on and get a skype call from your old high school buddy. You catch up on life and wonder when the next world of warcraft expansion will release. Life is okay.
The year is 2020. You're unemployed. No need to fill up on gas, you haven't left the house in months. You hop on discord to play some CSGO with friends, but it gets stale after losing the first game of the night. You log off, check the fridge a few times, pace the floor for a bit and then log back on. You miss the good old days. Eventually you get lost on some youtube rabbit hole and zone out until you finally go to sleep, knowing the cycle will repeat tomorrow. Life sucks.
The year is 2025. You just closed shift at your second part-time job. On the way back, you buy a subway footlong meal. 15 dollars. You fill up your tank for $52 and head straight home. Exhausted, you consider just lying down for the night, but you're interrupted by your roomate yelling on a voice chat from his room. You put in some ear buds to block the noise and instinctively pull out your phone. Hours go by in minutes and it's 11. Oops. You don't even remember what you were doing, but you'll regret it tomorrow when you're dozing off at work. You wish you were still unemployed, but you don't even know what you'd do with the time if you had it. Nothing interests you anymore. Life sucks.
@themilkman@theorytoe@EdBoatConnoisseur Learning languages is like history except you can be sure you aren't being lied to. Watching drift happen as you bounce from one region to the next is fascinating. Like, French sounds so different until you hear Catalan and then its like ooohhhh okay i kinda get how they got there. For me it's especially true when I look at grammar, because some languages like Spanish have really bizarre idiosyncrasies like colloquial "tener que" instead of "deber" which let my imagination run as to where they picked that up (probably english)
Currently I'm on a small hiatus from languages while I power through my last bit of schooling but my best friend's sister learned mandarin and she's helping to teach me.
@EdBoatConnoisseur@theorytoe It's context dependent. It was incredibly useful when I taught English to foreigners and played middleman with American tourists for pocket change, but back in the USA there's very little use. I tried my hand at teaching but amerimutts have no desire to learn anything so it's mostly moot. I'm also pretty sure there are passive boons to learning languages like cognitive exercise, or using it to strengthen English vocabulary, or those one-off bus rides where you can understand 100% of what everyone is saying and they don't know is a great feeling.
@Blouie I spent years living in an apartment right above a local pizzeria a handful of miles away from a train station in Generic City, Europe. I didn't have a car and life was very relaxing. I didn't even have a bike. Every day I took a morning jog to work, and every week I walked a bit extra for groceries on the way home. Effortless healthy lifestyle. The food was real. The people were thin. The city was beautiful. I didn't care I made basically no money, because I already had everything I would ever want. Now I live in the states and even in a 92% White community I still have to drive 20 minutes to and from work every day, and even when I try and be healthy, the only places to run are in the fucking road where there are no trees or sidewalk. Everyone's fat, food is shit, weather is shit, and its so pricey my car becomes my home. fuck this gay nigger country fuck my shitty nigger life.
@griffith it's almost like human resources as a concept is actually useful but mean the exact opposite in practice. like imagine if in MSGV you could totally automate the mother base unit allocation system but suddenly you stopped getting any new recruits and all your skilled people are shunted to unrelated units until you started losing all your R&D. that's what we have now
The moral of this story isn't "ultralight backpackers are right" but rather "If I were in the Vietnam War, I'd be strong enough to carry the M60 through the jungle, and I should never drop below that fitness level"
The fact that I envision life without the Internet and it seems like an immediate improvement really says everything you need to know about the modern Internet.
Coworker filling me in on the "tiktok ban" that somehow is still being talked about maybe actually happening, and he mentioned the new alternative called xiaohongshu and I did a genuine spit-take. I feel like an MKULTRA victim.